HECEMONY AND REVOLUTION ANTONIO GRAMSCI'S POLITICAL AND CULTURAL THEORY WALTER L. ADAMSON Hegemony and Revolution w ALTER L. ADAMSON HEGEMONY AND REVOLUTION A Study of Antonio Gramsci's Political and Cultural Theory UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley. Los Angl'lrs. London University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England Cl 1980 by The Regents of the University of California Printed in the United States of America I 234 5 6 7 8 9 Library of Conlrrss Cata[otin, in Publication Data Adamson, Walter L. Hc,emony and ,""vo[ution. Antonio Gram",j's political and cultural theory Bibliography: p. Includes indu I. Gramsci. Antonio. 189[-1937. 2. Gram""i. Antonio, 1�91-19J7-Polil;cal science. I. Title. tlX288.G7A�8 320.3')2"0924 79-64478 [SBN O-S2O-{lJ92U To my mother and ja(her and fO (he memory oj my grand/others Contents Acknowledgments Introduction PART ONE 1. The Formative Years 15 Cuhure and Politics in Post-Risorgimento italy 19 Between Croce and La Voce 26 Organizing a Collective Will 34 2. The "New Order" and II.f Col/apse 43 Gramsci's Russia and the Road to Marx 44 The �New Order" in Turin 50 Revolt in the PSI 64 3. FO!;ch.. ", Qlld Revolution in the WeSl 71 United Front and Fusion 73 The Meaning of Fascism 77 A Revolutionary Reassessment 82 Chairman Gramsci and the Southern Question 90 PARTTWQ 4. Philosophy as Political £dUc"ulion 105 Plato, Hegel, and Marx 106 The Second International and Its Critics 112 Bukharin. Croce. and Gramsci 120 The Pragmaloiogical Dialectic 130 vii VIII ! Contents 5. Political Educalion as the OVPrcomillg of Commoll Sense 140 The Psychological Foundation 147 The Social and Historical Context 155 The Coming of a Regulated Society 162 6. Hegemony, HislOrical Bloc. alld Italian History 169 Hegemony and HislOrical Bloc 170 The Polemic Against Croce 179 .Iacobinism and Its Absence 184 Transformism and Crisis of Authority 196 7. The Autonomy of Po li tics 202 The Modern Prince 207 State and Society 215 Revolution as "War of Position" 222 Conclusion: Gramsci's Political Theory in Historical Perspective 229 Notes 247 Selected Bibliography 285 Index 297 Acknowledgments SOME PASSAGES in this book have already appeared, somewhat differently arranged, in the following journal articles: "Towards the Prison Notebooks: The Evolution of Gramsci's Thinking on Political Organization, 1918·1926," Polity (Fall 1979); "Beyond Reform or Revolution: Notes on Political Ed· ucation in Gramsci, Habermas, and Arendt," Theory and SocielY (November 1978); and "Marx and Political Education," Review of Politics (July 1977). I am grateful to the editors for permission to reprint. My greatest debt is to George Armstrong Kelly, whose patient reading and telling criticisms were invaluable when a manuscript remotely resembling this one served as a dissertation in the History of Ideas Program at Brandeis University in 1976. Thanks are due as well to Gerald 1zenberg, who also read the manuscript at that time and offered many valuable suggestions. I am grateful to the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Harvard-Mellon Fellowship Program in the Humanities and its director, Richard M. Hunt, who put the resources of Widener Library at my disposal in 1977-78. Without this help the book would not yet be written. I would also like to acknowledge the generosity of the Research Committee at Emory University for a grant which greatly aided me in preparing the final manuscript for publication. ix x I Acknowledgments Finally, I thank Lauren, whose intellectual, logistical, and personal support was absolutely indispensable and far greater than she will ever realize. Atlanta June 1979 Introduction THE POLITICAL and cultural theory of Antonio Gramsci rests on a triple irony. Committed during his lifetime (1891· 1937) to political and journalistic activity as a "unity of theory and practice," he began to achieve his greatest recognition as a theorist only in 1947, long after his tragic death had shattered this unity. What gave him this recognition was the publication of his Prison Notebooks, written mostly in the early 1930s, smuggled to Russia upon his death, and returned to Italy at the war's end. Though enormously diverse in content, these notes arc shot through with a desire to free Italy from fascism. Yet, as a second irony, it must be conceded that without fascism's victory and his resulting imprisonment, Gramsci might well never have under­ taken any such sustained theoretical reflection. And thirdly, while this reflection remains bound to the problems of his epoch and his people, by the time his work appeared it was appreciated less for its historical value than for the suggestiveness of its categories for the politics of a new post-fascist and "technological" society. Indeed, his continent-wide and even transatlantic acclaim has been born only in the 1970s and by events of which, in most cases, he had nOI the faintest inkling: the demise of a theoretically impoverished New Left. the increased skepticism about the wider applicability of Eastern "roads to socialism," and the apparent emergence of a sui generis "Eurocommunism.� 2 I Introduction In Italy, Gramsci's postwar popularity was self-consciously generated and nurtured by the halian Communist Party (PCI), which elevated him to the level of a patron saint. Each of its many factions pressed hard to appropriate bim for its principles and programs. Extra-parliamentary groups flanking the PCI on the left and socialists (PSI) on its right later joined the fray, in many cases seeking to use Gramsci as an ideological wedge against the PCI. Even Benedetto Croce, the dominant force in Italian letters for half a century and a political liberal, could not resist referring to him as "one of us" after reading the first volume of the Prison Notebooks in 1947.1 The result is a dizzying array of perspectives; indeed, a major sector of the haHan publishing industry has built its foundation on Gramsci studies-and on contemporary po­ litical debates cast in surrogate form as Gramsci studies. As writers elsewhere on the continent have swelled the industry, a rich knowledge of the man and his work has become possible, though it must be disentangled from a number of partisan contexts. In contrast. English-language studies of Gramsci have been relatively few, though increasingly frequent in recent years. John Cammett's pioneering study of a decade ago approached Gramsci as part of a larger history of the PCI, which Gramsci helped to found in 1921.2 More recent devotees of this approach, like Martin Clark3 and Gwyn Williams,4 have much expanded our knowledge of the 1919-20 revolutionary wave in the Italian North and Gramsci's involvement in it. In addition, we have several biographiess and lengthy selections from the Prison Norebooks and the pre-prison journalism.� Enough of this had appeared by 1974 to allow the English historian Eric Hobsbawm to venture then that Gramsci is "probably the most original communist thinker produced in the twentieth century West" and "a political theorist, perhaps the only maj or Marxist thinker who can be so described ."7 Yet what we have always lacked, and what seems likely to be of the greatest long-term importance. is an interpre­ tative study which gives some substance to Hobsbawm's estima­ tion of Gramsci, and which offers a thorough reading of the Prison Norebooks in particular. This is the task I have SCI for myself in this book. Introduction I 3 Three motives lie below the book's surface. As I have reflected on the history of Marxist theory, I have become steadily more convinced thaI there exists an unambiguous (though widely scattered and never practically realized) tradition of what Mer­ leau-Ponty called "Western Marxism." This tradition stands in sharp contrast to the shape that Marxism received in the hands of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and other orthodox "Marxist-Leninists." Its representatives would certainly include the "Hegelian-Marxists" of the 19205,8 Gramsci, Georg lukacs, and Karl Korsch; Frank­ furt School theorists like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and, more recently, JUrgen Habermas; French existential and phenomenological Marxists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty; and the Eastern European "revi­ sionists" of the 19605 like Adam Schaff, Leszek Kolakowski, Karel Kosik, and Mihailo Markovic. One can also make good arguments for including "anticipators" like Antonio Labriola and Georges Sorel. Yet, on any such accounting, it is striking how historically confined such theorizing has been. Apart from the first flowering of this tradition from 1919 to 1926 (the year of Stalin's ascension and the consolidation of Italian fascism's totalitarian tum). most of its expressions have come only since 1956 (the year of the Hungarian Revolution and the critique of Stalinism at the Soviet Communist Party's Twentieth Congress). To launch an historical inquiry into the reasons for this relative dearth would be a fruitful project but one beyond my own knowledge and energy.9 What does concern me is the more modest task of ascertaining (I) how it was that Gramsci's own intellectual development saved him from the perdition of a positivist or historically determinist and "totalitarian" Marxism, and (2) how-or better. to what extent and with what conse­ quences-he was able to theorize a first version of the "Western Marxist" alternative. My second motive has been to discover why and how Gramsci's Marxism took such a uniquely political direction. If Lukacs and Korsch had reacted just as forcefully against the philosophical sterility of Second International Marxism, Gramsci alone had recognized the need for a political response which analyzed the contemporary Western state and the possibility of posing an 4 I Introduction activist and essentially educational politics against it.